Philosophers’ Corner

  • The Demands of Morality

    When you do the moral thing, you’re doing the right thing. Violating morality is doing the wrong thing. It’s good to do the right thing; bad to do the wrong thing. You will always do better and live better when you do the moral thing. But imagine the following scenario. Suppose you live in a country full of tax cheats, but you’re honest to the bone and you dutifully pay your taxes. What does that make you — a saint among sinners, or a sucker? How does doing the right thing improve your life?

  • Will Innovation Kill Us?

    Arguably, the single greatest threat to our continued existence on this planet is climate change. And we would not be facing this threat were it not for human ingenuity. After a mere two centuries or so of industrialization, our innovative activity on this planet has produced such a quantity of greenhouse gases that we are perilously close to the tipping point when climate change will accelerate on its own power, and nothing we do anymore will be able to stop it. Provided, that is, we don’t have a global nuclear meltdown first.

  • The Culture Wars: Phase 2?

    Here is a conjecure.  We are by now deep into a new phase of the so-called…

  • Spinoza

    Baruch Spinoza is sometimes called “the father of modernity.” Spinoza, along with Descartes and Leibniz, is considered one of the great rationalists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Of the three of them, Spinoza was philosophically the most radical.

  • Collective Immortality: Living on Through Others

    I don’t think that the prospect of death saps life of meaning. People dread death, to be sure, especially a premature death. But that does not mean that they want to live forever. But dreading death is consistent with living with purpose and determination, even in the face of death.

  • What is Cultural Appropriation?

    This Halloween we’ll see kids, college students, and other revelers dressed in costumes ranging from…

  • In Praise of Love – Plato’s Symposium meets Bernstein’s Serenade

    Plato’s Symposium is by turns hilarious, emotionally resonant, and always philosophically deep. It’s a fun and inspiring read. If you haven’t ever read it, you really should. It certainly inspired Leonard Bernstein., who apparently read it repeatedly. Bravely, Bernstein sets out to reproduce in music something of both the philosophical content and literary structure of the Symposium.

  • The Logic of Regret

      This week we’re thinking about the Logic of Regret. Regret is a feeling of…

  • Bioethics – Myths and Realities

    Designer babies are a common specter when people think about genetics and bioethics. Sounds pretty benign if you’re just envisioning parents who choose to have kids with defect-free genetic endowments. But it’s frightening to think of that power and knowledge in the hands of a latter-day Hitler.

  • Dance as a Way of Knowing

    The title of this week’s show might sound a little mysterious. How can dance, of all things, be a way of knowing? Most things we know, we know either through perception or through thinking and reasoning. But on the surface of things, it doesn’t look like dance is either a form of perception or a form of thinking. So, in what sense is dance a way of knowing?

  • Technological Immortality

    Immortality, of the desirable kind, usually brings Heaven to mind. A great place to live, if the details are a bit obscure. But, as far as I have been told, the only technology involved is doing what God wants you to do, and then dying. So has Apple or Microsoft come up with a better way of getting to Heaven?